Authors: Peter L Langen Bo M Vinther
Publish Date: 2008/07/10
Volume: 32, Issue: 7-8, Pages: 1035-1054
Abstract
The response in northern hemisphere atmospheric circulation and the resulting changes in moisture sources for Greenland precipitation to glacial boundary conditions are studied in NCAR’s CCM3 atmospheric general circulation model fitted with a moisture tracking functionality We employ both the CLIMAP SST reconstruction and a modification thereto with reconstructions of glacial ice sheets and land masks The individual components of the boundary conditions are added first one at a time and finally together These steps show the atmospheric circulation to respond approximately linearly to the boundary condition changes and the full glacial change may thus be decomposed into contributions from SST and topography changes respectively We find that using the CLIMAP SST reconstruction leads to a shift from Atlantic toward Pacific source regions not found with the modified reconstruction having cooler tropics and less sea ice The occurrence of such a shift depends chiefly on the SST reconstruction and not on the existence of the large northern hemisphere glacial ice sheets The influence of these circulation changes on important factors for ice core interpretation such as precipitation seasonality condensation temperatures and source temperatures are assessedBoth authors are supported by the Carlsberg Foundation This work was supported in part by a grant of HPC resources from the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center ARSC at the University of Alaska Fairbanks as part of the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program We thank Harald Sodemann and an anonymous reviewer for comments and suggestions that have significantly improved the manuscriptThe dynamical advection and diffusion of the tracers is accomplished by the distributed model’s builtin infrastructure for tracers for details see Kiehl et al 1996 This uses a semiLagrangian transport SLT scheme for both the model’s moisture field and for tracers In this manner the transport of the individual moisture tracers parallels that of the total moisture field Due to the fact that the SLT is nonconservative a fixer is applied to the fields at each time step to assure global conservation Kiehl et al 1996 However if one tracer is adjusted in a grid point subsequent enforcement of Eq 8 can lead to a net transformation of one tracer into another Nevertheless we have checked the consistency between the total amount of evaporated and precipitated tracer “what goes up must come down” and found that the majority of the tracers are conserved within 1 and all are conserved within 3
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